Unleashing AI’s potential: Salesforce’s game-changing open-source models
A key innovation of xGen-MM is its ability to handle “interleaved data” combining multiple images and text, which the researchers describe as “the most natural form of multimodal data.” This capability allows the models to perform complex tasks like answering questions about multiple images simultaneously, a skill that could prove invaluable in real-world applications ranging from medical diagnosis to autonomous vehicles.
The release includes variants of the model optimized for different purposes, including a base pretrained model, an “instruction-tuned” model for following directions, and a “safety-tuned” model designed to reduce harmful outputs. This range of models reflects a growing awareness in the AI community of the need to balance capability with safety and ethical considerations.